Tag: Writing

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through not to

I’m an anxious person. I’ve been like this as long as I can remember. Worried. Worried about something. Usually intangible things. Sometimes this anxiety seeps over, drips down into my guts and I feel physically unwell. Sometimes it’s just in my head. Wherever it resides it is always just around the corner. Others certainly have it worse. It may be a problem of modernity. We’re all constantly being inundated with bad news and, even worse, others’ good news. For me, I know it’s not just the modern world, I can’t think of a single conscious moment in my life (four years old is perhaps the earliest) where I wasn’t susceptible to laying in bed and thinking through the many, and most horrendous, outcomes that could come my way. Strange little kid.

I made the mistake of studying Philosophy as an undergrad. This, of course, compounded the issue. Gave me new and incredible (pedantic and boring, really) ways to unpack reality. As it turns out, I was right to be worried all the time. The world is and always has been an overlapping of catastrophes. Our parents had nuclear war at their doorstep and unsurprisingly events are nothing if not cyclical. Humans do have the capacity for beauty. I work in an art museum where that beauty is on full display. Of course, nearly every artifact in our possession was either stolen or has ties with a rich sociopath (likely both!). This all to say, life is hard.

Two things have been constant in my life as a way to shut off the anxiety: martial arts and writing. Shut off may be going too far. Martial arts won’t let you be anxious, not exactly. There’s no time when a person who outweighs you by fifty pounds wants to take your foot home and feed it to their children. Here, the anxiety is, at least, purely existential. There’s a problem to solve, a limb to protect. I’ve written about it before, but my main martial arts practice is Jiu Jitsu. The art of the little guy, or so they say. The art of getting smooshed. The art, really, of patience and persistence. I’m a purple belt which means nothing to ninety percent of the world. For those who know, they know it means that every white belt on earth wants to kill me and if I can survive a round with a high school wrestler, the fact that we’re always living halfway through the apocalypse doesn’t quite bother me as much. This is mostly because after those rounds I’m trying with all my might not to throw up. 

The truth is Jiu Jitsu actually makes me more anxious than anything else I do. The walk from my car to class is filled with an intense desire to bury myself in the ground and never communicate with another person for as long as I live. Not once in my whole life have I been excited to go to (any) class. Fantastic people, camaraderie, a sense of purpose, otherworldly coaching, health, the list of positives is endless. Yet, I don’t wanna go. I want to drink coffee. I want to take a long, lonely shower. But once Jiu Jitsu is happening, that big guy from before has my neck, it doesn’t matter what I want or don’t want. You move until you’re dead. 

And then there’s writing, the sister of my martial arts practice. When I finished my undergrad, they asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said, “I want to be a novelist.” Novelist isn’t a job. Sure, there are lucky people out there who have equal parts business acumen and creative grit. I have neither, I have a compulsion to tell stories. This is a non-lucrative sickness. I want more than anything on earth for people to validate, interact, even enjoy my writing, but I’d rather be covered in ants and launched into the sun than network. Can you imagine a more terrible fate than networking? My god. There’s a balance to be struck and I’m slowly working toward it.

So, I write and I write. I write, in a way, toward nothingness. The creation of a perfect story is the story that once finished, everything else shuts off. There’s no more anxiety. There’s no more work to do. I just get to walk away and stop buzzing about. This is where the luck of being a writer is. You’ll never ever achieve the perfect story. You’ll die long before you’re even close. Luck, curse—whatever. It’s a lifetime project. None of us will ever be the perfect communicators. It’s kinda fun to try though. Try, try.

What do these two things have in common? Jiu Jitsu and writing. Recently I was sparring with the coach at my gym. I use sparring very loosely here. He’s a high-level competitor, a profoundly talented black-belt. At any moment he could snap my head off (literally). I was feeling extra tired—near death—and he said something that perfectly sums up these two endeavors. “Go through it, not to it.” This is magical. The only truly finalized project is your final breath. That’s pretty darn goth, but it’s true. Everything else is in flux. If you’re lucky, like me, you’ll have something to work through for the rest of your life. It’s the days that I imagine some endpoint when I feel the most unsure of myself. There’s beauty in doing and sorrow in finishing—maybe. Something like that.

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Current Projects

My current project is a novel. If I’m being kind to myself, very kind, I’d say that it’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicles meets The New York Trilogy with a bit of Ogawa and Saramago thrown in. And, lordy, if I’m being kind to myself, doesn’t that sound amazing? What it really is, if I give it some room, is a disjointed, rambling, wannabe-Beckett (in moments), detective-y thing. It’s definitely ambitious and if I stick with it I’ll have something pretty cool. Something very distinctly—Mikey.

My novel coming out this year with Montag Press is also distinctly Mikey, but in a very different way. This project is a work of pure, unabashed imagination. And I’m talking played-with-action-figures-well-into-my-teens kind of imagination. It’s a fantasy {I think (fantasy adjacent)} adventure story. Here, if I do my best elevator pitch, I’d say this book is Terry Pratchett meets Takashi Miiike’s 13 Assassins. Funny-violent-karate. My wheelhouse for entertainment, not necessarily for literary output. Nonetheless, it’s been a blast to put together and I’m excited for you all to see it.

This was gonna be an essay on my struggles with writing. I’d even go as far to say that, for me, writing is necessarily a struggle. Instead, it’s me trying to lean into some optimism. Writing can feel thankless and when it’s not thankless, it can feel pointless. I mean, I’m going from a Bachelors of Philosophy degree to a Masters in Creative Writing—put all that together and you get a man that’s very good at thinking and writing about not having any job prospects ☺. All of my hard work is paying off, though. I am a writer. I am becoming. I am trying.

If you’re reading this, thank you. You’re a part of a very small group that’s witnessing something emerging and being all at once. My voice is coming together, and who knows, maybe someday people will enjoy my work and want more. But in the end, greatness is for the graveyard. So I’ll just keep cramming words together in hopes of a few moments of clarity.

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tulip and Trevor

Trevor Hale is: a punk rocker, a hardcore kid, a DIY dreamboat—and I’m lucky to count him as a friend. Nearly ten years ago I wrote a book called tulip. It’s a decent book, and I’d even say it stands up after all these years. It’s unmistakably the work of a first time novelist with a fresh bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Angsty, slippery ruminations on a world I didn’t quite understand. I still don’t—even less—but I know that now. Nonetheless, it captures something. A clear moment in time for me.

tulip is the story of a young man that worries he can talk to god. One publishing house that asked for a full manuscript said they loved my writing, but in the end the story was a bit too allegorical for their taste. My first of many heartbreaks in the literary world. They weren’t wrong. tulip was born out of a young mind. A Catholic kid turned atheist in the land of Mormons. I was often asked, “If not god, what guides your moral compass?” Versions of that question drove the misadventures of my protagonist and dear friend, Tulip. He was the vehicle for me to unpack and begin to understand my own empathy technologies.

I queried the hell of it. Had some bites, but nothing stuck. I confronted a reality all writers must at one point or another—sometimes writing the book is the easiest part. When I was a kid I figured once the project was finished publishers would be lining up. I was a dumb kid.

Trevor and I mostly saw each other in passing—at coffee shops and laundromats and during the “hardcore handshake”, an after show ritual that was tough on a shy kid like me. Trevor is a cultural institution. It’d be easier to say what bands he hasn’t been an integral part of in the Salt Lake Hardcore community for last twenty years. Some of my blurriest, happiest memories as a kid involve Trevor playing guitar as other tattooed bodies piled on the stage with him in sometimes violent, always chaotic attempts at sharing the microphone—all the while I was somewhere in the middle genuinely trying to hurt myself. A sure fire way to get the wiggles out and the occasional black eye.

So when Trevor offered to publish my book I was a bit in disbelief. The person who had been the soundtrack to so much of my youth wanted to help me get my first novel into the world. But a few months later I stood next to him and held the first proof of my book and probably wanted to cry but likely just muttered some “hell yeahs” and some “wows”. Trevor has always had faith in genuine creators, the most central axiom of a true punk rocker. To somehow be part of the output of the most outputtingness, real dude on earth is quite the honor.

Go to his website, buy some stuff. Listen to the generations of Hardcore he’s participated in and influenced. And if you see Tulip, be kind to him, he’s my firstborn.